Enthusiasm is an admirable quality, but it won’t build walls for you

Nothing is meant to last forever I suppose, but you expect a brick wall to survive more than about 14 years I would think.

One morning last week Wifey looked out of (what was) the kitchen window and shrieked. To be honest it was exactly the same as the noise she just made when she discovered that “someone” hadn’t closed the macaroni properly, so it was hard to know whether to run, walk¹, or pretend I hadn’t heard, but the fact was that a section of our five foot high garden wall had collapsed outwards onto the pavement and into the road.

A few things sprang to mind. Firstly and obviously, thank ^%&* nobody was walking past at the time. Secondly thank something-or-other there was no car parked by it and finally, thank the patron saint of scooters that it didn’t fall inwards onto Wifey’s pink Vespa.

Our fantastic crew that C put together happened to turn up just as we were standing outside and helped us to move the debris to the end of our driveway and later our chippie turned up and patched up the gap with a piece of driveway gate that’s been doing nothing for about 18 months.

Oh and the piece of wall that collapsed, on closer inspection, was built at the same time as the extensions to the flat under the auspices of (or possibly by) the same enthusiastic chap responsible for the shower room plumbing. The mortar seemed to be more sand than cement and wasn’t tied to the walls either end properly.

¹Wifey once called from the shower to tell me there was a slug creeping up the wall shouting “Come on! Quickly!”. I ran (because I’m a dutiful husband), but I had to ask, just how slowly would I have had to walk in order to miss a slug?

The shower/steam enclosure with – er – more wood

One thing that’s been impressing me since the renovation got truly under way a few weeks back is the sheer competence of the guys doing it. C has put together a fantastic team who seem to have the ability to Just Get Things Done.

But mostly I’m enjoying having burly men strutting around the house all day long. I mentioned this to Wifey who found the concept mildly disturbing, but I explained to her that she was free to enjoy having them around the house too.

Looking at the shower/steam enclosure here, I was wondering how you tile right into the corner where the curved bit joins the wall. The carpenter told me that it “won’t be [his] problem” and that’s a good enough explanation for me.

File this under things you wish you’d said at the time you spotted the problems under the shower.

I never thought I’d quote Margaret Thatcher, but

REJOIST REJOIST!

(Grabs coat, exits sharply through French doors).

This picture isn’t at all amusing

When we originally started to look at John Lewis of Hungerford’s Creme de la Creme reproduction of English Rose Kitchen they told us that their paint comes from the wonderful Fired Earth range, so for around a year we were convinced that Fired Earth was the place to go for our paint.

A few weeks back we finally got to Fired Earth in Holland Park. As we got near the end of Portland Road we saw a door in the most incredible vintage blue/green with a hint of pastel. Very hard to describe, but you’ll understand when I post the pictures.

Fired Earth just didn’t have quite what we were after, so we left a note through the beautiful door (it was Obama’s inauguration day and we could see the TV on inside so we didn’t like to intrude) explaining our situation and the owner was kind enough to call back the next day, saying that they had a pot of the paint left over that we could borrow to copy from.

Our fantastic contractor C, by the way, did a lot of research to find our who would give us the best deal on coating them. He found a body shop under the Westway that’s doing them right now – getting dents out and coating them with our chosen colour.

I can’t say enough good things about C. Only I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice to say that if anyone needs a recommendation I’ll put you in touch. Meanwhile, just because an article is a bi boring without any pictures, here’s a picture of the shower/steam room with the shower enclosure being built. Note that we actually have a floor in there now. Note also that this is a blog about our kitchen and I keep talking about the shower/steam room. Ho hum!

The floor where the shower used to be

Now I’m actually good friends with the guy who built the extensions on and subsequently sold me the flat, but his work tends to focus on the creative rather than the practical. We were thinking of trying to rescue the floor tiles in the shower/steam room, but in the event we realised we’d need to rip them up to fit in all the new bits and pieces. Thank goodness we did.

It turned out that at one end, the shower had been so badly fitted that it had been leaking water onto the underlying floorboards and joists for around a decade and a half, and at the other end some particularly dodgy plumbing around the washing machine had done a similar number on the flooring there.

The floor and wall where the washing machine used to be

Only the fact that the damp had spread up the adjoining wall saved the joists that end from a similar fate.

In addition the leaky washing machine plumbing was inches away from the mains outlet. It also turns out that most of the house was running on one electricity circuit. Our electrician said that it’s a miracle that we haven’t had a fire before.

One of the pipes had been fitted rather rustically whereby instead of using an elbow to go round a corner it had simply been bent.

My friend’s enthusiasm for renovation projects knows no bounds however, and he has since moved on to demonstrate his own peculiar approach to carpentry and plumbing to the French. Vive la différence!